I think I agree with Sophie in that it comes down to the definition of 'anti' and 'opposite' and there are actually several different solutions depending on how you look at it.

The two easiest solutions just depend upon the interpretation of zero.

If I give you a bag of apples, you then have some apples, which would be the opposite of having no apples, but if I give you four apples it would not be the opposite of zero apples because this would also apply to three or five apples, or indeed any number of apples, and we end up with zero being the opposite to every number. It comes down to how we treat zero. If zero is treated as a number then the opposite of n cannot be zero, but if zero is treated as the absence of a number then it works.

But another way of looking at the issue is to define exactly what an anti-apple is. I suspect that most people would probably say that an anti-apple would be an apple made out of anti-matter, but would this really be the opposite of an apple because it would still be an apple, albeit one made out of anti-matter? An alternative way of defining an anti-apple would be to say that an anti-apple is anything that is not exactly an apple, which could be expressed as

anti-n = set(infinity) - element(n)

And related to that definition is the one that says an anti-apple is anything that has zero apple-like qualities, but this then needs all qualities that might be regarded as apple-like to be identified. Mathematically, this is rather like looking at prime numbers.

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...And its claws are as big as cups, and for some reason it's got a tremendous fear of stamps! And Mrs Doyle was telling me it's got magnets on its tail, so if you're made out of metal it can attach itself to you! And instead of a mouth it's got four arses!

4 August 2004Dramatic Assymetrical Matter, Antimatter Decay Observedby Kate Melville Physicists believe that when the universe began, matter and antimatter were present in equal amounts. But all observations indicate that the universe is made only of matter, so one of the big questions that physicists want to answer is "what happened to the antimatter?"

Physicists conducting the BaBar (B and B-Bar) experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) yesterday announced exciting new results demonstrating a dramatic difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter. The results have been submitted to the Physical Review Letters journal. SLAC's PEP-II accelerator collides electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, to produce an abundance of exotic heavy particle and anti-particle pairs known as B and anti-B mesons. These rare forms of matter and antimatter are short-lived, decaying in turn to other lighter subatomic particles, such as kaons and pions.

"If there were no difference between matter and antimatter, both the B meson and the anti-B meson would exhibit exactly the same pattern of decays. However, our new measurement shows an example of a large difference in decay rates instead," said BaBar spokesman Marcello Giorgi.

By sifting through the decays of more than 200 million pairs of B and anti-B mesons, BaBar experimenters have discovered striking matter-antimatter asymmetry. "We found 910 examples of the B meson decaying to a kaon and a pion, but only 696 examples for the anti-B mesons," Giorgi said.

While BaBar and other experiments have observed matter-antimatter asymmetries before, this is the first instance in B decays of a difference obtained by simply counting up the number of matter and antimatter decays, a phenomenon known as direct charge parity (CP) violation. "We have observed a clear, strong signal for asymmetrical behavior of matter and antimatter resulting from the direct CP violation mechanism," said James Olsen, one of the leaders of the analysis.

The new observation of a 13 percent preference for the B meson over the anti-B meson dwarfs a similar effect observed in kaons at only a tiny rate of 4 parts in a million. "The effect we have measured with B mesons is roughly 100,000 times stronger than for kaons," Olsen said. "The pattern of different types of matter-antimatter asymmetries is starting to come together into a coherent picture."

Physicists speculate that subtle differences between the behavior of matter and antimatter must be responsible for the matter-antimatter imbalance that developed in our universe. But current knowledge of these differences is incomplete and insufficient to account for the observed matter domination. CP violation is one of the three conditions outlined by Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov to account for the observed imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.

"The new measurement is very much a result of the outstanding performance of SLAC's PEP-II accelerator and the efficiency of the BABAR detector," Giorgi said. "The accelerator is now operating at 3 times its design performance and BaBar is able to record about 98 percent of collisions." "The observation of the direct CP violation effect in B decays is a significant step forward in assembling the pieces of the puzzle of matter versus antimatter," said SLAC Director Jonathan Dorfan.

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The Truth remains the Truth regardless of our beliefs or opinions the Truth is always the Truth even if we know it or do not know it (The Truth remains the Truth)

To be objective as possible to describe this new solution as clear as possible about double anti-universes at a distance (CPT symmetric) idea, related to my solution on Schrdingers Cat paradox, I use here the Wikipedia description of: three phenomena:

In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation or measurement takes place. This experiment makes apparent the fact that the nature of measurement, or observation, is not well defined in this interpretation.Broadly stated, a quantum superposition is the combination of all the possible states of a system (at least two, for example, the possible positions of a subatomic particle). The Copenhagen interpretation implies that the superposition only undergoes collapse into a definite state at the exact moment of quantum measurement

Schrdinger''s cat is a thought experiment, often described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrdinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics being applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term Verschrnkung (entanglement).

Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. This interconnection leads to correlations between observable physical properties of remote systems. For example, quantum mechanics holds that states such as spin are indeterminate until such time as some physical intervention is made to measure the spin of the object in question.

My proposal for Schrdinger''s Cat is not that the Cat remains in a superposition of states before somebody is looking into the box, but the universe itself is constantly ,"looking" by entanglement of anti-copy particles located at a long distance away from each other.

This is very hard to understand, not because the Big bang and the universe should be fully symmetrical, but we have to introduce the idea that there is a TIMELESS information exchange between these copy particles.Secondly it is very hard to accept the idea that WE HUMANS ARE NOT UNIQUE AND HAVE TO CONQUER CONTINUOUSLY by entanglement WITH OUR COPY EGOS living inside an other universe far away, .

And this comment nutty be it may was from a friend of mine from another forum and here is the link and dialogue

Hello Alan McDougall

JAaronNicholson has posted to the Paradoxes Resolved, Origins Illuminated board that you requested notification on. Regarding the subject - Why I disagree with static eternal universe.

The thing about entropy that I see is that only things that have first been built up in some way can be in a position were they can then fall apart or back to the energy level that they started at. Things can only return to a previously less structured or less hot state after having been artificially or by "divine-design" first been built up or structured or caused into existence from neutral raw elements and raw energies.

There is a flow back and forth--in one direction, perhaps by design--in the other direction maybe not by any particular design, just a relaxing of the original "intent" and the sand castle is washed back to a flat surface by the ocean''s incoming tide.

I have to go with no Big Bang, also. "Deaths and births" whether of humans or stars or galaxies are taking a myopic view of nature. You have to step way back and see where the beginnings came from and where the endings are going onto to, in order to see the whole picture which is just endlessly cyclical.

I know that this is equally difficult to put our frail human minds around, but this is a much more satisfying choice for me than that of a single shot of everything coming into existence out of a point and becoming all of this. That is just never going to work for me.

The BaBar experiment results are very interesting indeed, but isn't that degree of asymmetry way too high to fit the observed state of the universe?

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...And its claws are as big as cups, and for some reason it's got a tremendous fear of stamps! And Mrs Doyle was telling me it's got magnets on its tail, so if you're made out of metal it can attach itself to you! And instead of a mouth it's got four arses!

The BaBar experiment results are very interesting indeed, but isn't that degree of asymmetry way too high to fit the observed state of the universe?

Yes there is a great deal of interesting work being done there,I think with the huge LHC tool maybe they can plunge into this mystery .

Somewhere in the attic of my mind I remember a suggestion, that an antiuniverse could have been formed at the big bang event and the matter universe separated from the antimatter universe by antigravity, which would perhaps act as gravity in this other reality, if it exists

Alan

Alan

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The Truth remains the Truth regardless of our beliefs or opinions the Truth is always the Truth even if we know it or do not know it (The Truth remains the Truth)

Thanks for the link, but a huge amount of antimatter would be needed for an intersteller antimatter spaceship.

A sugar cube size antimatter matter device could could produce enough energy to supply a city of significant size for a period of a month or so, but this is just from memory and is just an example of the huge potential of antimatter energy

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The Truth remains the Truth regardless of our beliefs or opinions the Truth is always the Truth even if we know it or do not know it (The Truth remains the Truth)

It's a little complicated: Anti-matter certainly exists, and for every type of particle there is a corresponding anti-particle. For many years it was thought that particles acted just like anti-particles, thus leading to the puzzle of whywe seem to see mostly matter. In the early 60's it was discovered -- at around the same time -- that both charge conjugation symmetry ( particles are equivalent toanti-particles ) and parity symmetry ( our world and mirror image world look the same)are not respected. However, for a few more years it was though that the combined symmetry(CP) was respected. I this were true then for every particle you would have an anti-particle of opposite parity, so still we would expect equal amounts of matterand anti-matter.

In the late 60's Cronin and Fitch (who won the Nobel prize in 1980 for this) discoveredthat CP was not conserved when studying the decay/oscillation of a kaon to an anti-kaon.Such CP-violation is now part of the Standard Model of particle physics. Within the standard model this CP-violation is controlled by a single parameter. The aforementionedattempts to study CP-violation on the b-meson system are not an attempt to discoverCP-violation (been there, done that), but to get another extraction of this parameter. If it agrees with that from the kaon system (does so far), then the Standard Model looks good, it if differs (let's hope) then we have a handle to move beyond thestandard model.

That being said: The Standard Model does lead to matter/anti-matter asymmetry,but, as observed, this effect comes entirely from the weak force and is *tiny*; certainly not enough to naively explain the asymmetry we see.However, this asymmetry could have been seeded in the early universe wherethe rules are very different than we see now. For example, there are several theories that use the fact that QCD (so the strong, not the weak force) canbreak CP to explain this; while we see no evidence that this happens inour experiments, this is an effect that should grow with energy. As such, itmight have been strong enough in the early universe to account for thematter/anti-matter asymmetry, while still being weak enough at the energies our current experiments probe that we couldn't measure it.

Interesting summary Chris.A couple of questions:1) Presumably what we are looking for is a very tiny parity breaking in chromodynamics at very high energies, which would have allowed a small amount of the original anti-matter to decay? This would have produced a slight imbalance which, after matter-antimatter annihilation, would account for the observable 'matter only' universe. Is that the gist?2) Is the LHC likely to produce energies sufficient to observe this parity breaking?

The universe is asymmetrical in that of it consists almost completely of normal mass, matter and energy. "This is lucky for us" as Symmetrical universe of equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have resulted in a universe of pure energy of Gama rays, no planets, stars, galaxies, just radiant energy.

The big bang theory suggests that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created at this event. But this did not happen

Why??

Alan

It was only a second exactly after big bang that the universe began flooding with particles - and after 300 million years, a multitude of stars exploded, forming the planets and new stars, creating the superspiral galaxies we can observe to this day. However, a problem arises - it is 'the' quintessential paradox concerning the creation of matter.

Planets, stars, even entire galaxies should not even be here! When ordinary matter came out of spacetime, an equal amount of 'antimatter' should have formed in proportion. Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter, but with opposite properties in their electrical charge. Because of this unique difference, whenever antimatter comes into contact with ordinary matter, the annihilate each other in a catastrophic burst of energy (the kind of energy or gamma rays everything originated from) - they would explode, strangely enough, with twice as much energy as the particles contained.

When an antiparticle comes into contact with a normal particle they produce two deadly photons. The reason why two photons are the result is that for antiparticles have no net momentum, while a single photon will always have momentum. Conservation laws thus say that two photons must be created with zero-net momentum.

Paul A. M. Dirac discovered the existence of antimatter, purely by mathematical reasoning. He found that whenever a particle pops into existence, let's say, by simply adding enough energy into the vacuum of space, it will force the virtual particle to be real and as it emerges into real space, it leaves behind a hole - this too is a particle - its antipartner. He got a Nobel Prize for his discovery...

Thus when all matter and antimatter formed, they should have eliminated each other, leaving behind a universe with nothing but a brilliant glow of gamma radiation. Yet, reality proves this is not the case. Truth is, we haven't got a substantial amount of antimatter in our universe. However, it is thought there will be entire 'antigalaxies', with 'antistars' and 'antiplanets' that have never came into contact with normal matter.

There is undeniably more matter than antimatter - but this seems like a contradictory statement, especially when both types of matter had to be created in equal proportion. No one is sure how this can be possible - however, some physicists say that the excess matter survived annihilation because their antipartners are not their complete opposites. This was first discovered in the 1964 by physicists James Cronin and Val Vitch, who won a Nobel Prize on the work done on the particle called the 'Kaon.'

Physicists now believe that the Kaon lives longer than the 'Antikaon.' This differential life expectancy might answer why there appears to be a lot more matter than antimatter; hence, disturbances in what we call symmetrical fundamental interactions may answer to why there is more of the good stuff, than the antistuff

It's a little complicated: Anti-matter certainly exists, and for every type of particle there is a corresponding anti-particle. For many years it was thought that particles acted just like anti-particles, thus leading to the puzzle of whywe seem to see mostly matter. In the early 60's it was discovered -- at around the same time -- that both charge conjugation symmetry ( particles are equivalent toanti-particles ) and parity symmetry ( our world and mirror image world look the same)are not respected. However, for a few more years it was though that the combined symmetry(CP) was respected. I this were true then for every particle you would have an anti-particle of opposite parity, so still we would expect equal amounts of matterand anti-matter.

In the late 60's Cronin and Fitch (who won the Nobel prize in 1980 for this) discoveredthat CP was not conserved when studying the decay/oscillation of a kaon to an anti-kaon.Such CP-violation is now part of the Standard Model of particle physics. Within the standard model this CP-violation is controlled by a single parameter. The aforementionedattempts to study CP-violation on the b-meson system are not an attempt to discoverCP-violation (been there, done that), but to get another extraction of this parameter. If it agrees with that from the kaon system (does so far), then the Standard Model looks good, it if differs (let's hope) then we have a handle to move beyond thestandard model.

That being said: The Standard Model does lead to matter/anti-matter asymmetry,but, as observed, this effect comes entirely from the weak force and is *tiny*; certainly not enough to naively explain the asymmetry we see.However, this asymmetry could have been seeded in the early universe wherethe rules are very different than we see now. For example, there are several theories that use the fact that QCD (so the strong, not the weak force) canbreak CP to explain this; while we see no evidence that this happens inour experiments, this is an effect that should grow with energy. As such, itmight have been strong enough in the early universe to account for thematter/anti-matter asymmetry, while still being weak enough at the energies our current experiments probe that we couldn't measure it.

Chrisdsn I read your explanation again but got stuck on this"Within the standard model this CP-violation is controlled by a single parameter. The aforementioned attempts to study CP-violation on the b-meson system are not an attempt to discoverCP-violation (been there, done that), but to get another extraction of this parameter. "

I thought that those CP-violations was something not foreseen in the standard model?Also I would like to say thanks for a very nice explanation, otherwise;)

If anti-gravity acts as a repulsive force, will this have the opposite effect to time dilation? That is, the rate of time is highest for an infinitely distant observer where the gravitational field is infinitely small and this could be considered to be the base-line rate of time. The actual rate of time in the universe will always be lower than the base-line rate of time because the gravitational field everywhere in the observable universe is greater than infinitely small. However, if anti-gravity increases the rate of time, then as one approached an anti-matter black hole, time would pass more quickly and you'd start getting some very weird energy results.

I knew there was something bugging me about that and it's just clicked.

Gravitational time dilation is due to the curvature of spacetime. The greater the curvature, the greater the dilation. Gravity produces that curvature. So antigravity would produce anticurvature. And what is anti-curvature? It's flat. In flat spacetime there is no time dilation.

HA... get out of that 1!

Rather nice DB:)

If we looked at time from the 'side' of mass for a moment.And said that 'mass' is what creates our 'space' and ?Time too?

And that acceleration also creates the 'effect' of mass.

We would have mass and acceleration?Wouldn't we.

but why acceleration? as in this 'game', 'mass' is what would create what we see as space and time.Acceleration would then be something happening inside our 'protected area'.Created by that 'mass'.